Secession petitions – and responses – continue to sprout up

Americans disappointed that President Barack Obama won re-election are letting off steam by demanding their states secede. The movement is strongest in that reddest of states -- Texas -- and in other states that voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney.

As of Thursday, more than 107,000 Texans had joined the Texas petition at We the People, the federal government website where anyone can start a petition.

While 40 states have petitions for secession, most have gotten just a few hundred or thousand signers. But both Tennessee and Alabama had more than 28,000 backers.

In addition, there’s a petition in support of deporting anyone who signs a petition to secede from the Union. And someone, perhaps from one of Texas’ more liberal cities, has posted a petition seeking signatures for Austin to withdraw from the Lone Star State but remain part of the United States.

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The petition drive is just a way for angry voters to let off steam after a highly emotional and divisive campaign, said John Scheb, head of the political science department at the University of Tennessee.

Not only is secession unlikely, it’s not even legally possible, Scheb said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1869 that states cannot unilaterally secede from the union. “The position the court took was once in (the union), always in,” Scheb said.

What’s more, “Democracy depends on people’s willingness to accept democratic decisions when they lose, and people need to think about that,” Scheb said. “We all lose from time to time, and it’s never fun to lose. But the alternative is some kind of authoritarian system.”

Don Frazier, a history professor at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, said, “A lot of people have a misconception that Texas reserved the right to leave the union ... That option is not in that constitution, it’s not in our constitution or any other constitution.”

To Frazier, one shouldn’t take the petition seriously. He noted that it’s a lot easier to sign a petition online than “do the hard ground-game work that needs to be done if the GOP is going to be a viable national party in the future.”

Brandon Puttbrese, spokesman for the Tennessee Democratic Party, called the secession petition “radical nonsense” that is “a direct result of the Tea Party extremism and intolerance we have seen from elected Republicans in Tennessee.”

“Sadly,” Puttbrese said, “this kind of extremism only breeds more of the division and rancor that is prohibiting our leaders from making progress on putting Tennesseans back to work and protecting middle class families.”

But Chris Devaney, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, noted that nearly 50 percent of Americans voted against Obama. In Tennessee, Obama lost to Republican Mitt Romney by 20 percentage points.

“We can argue whether the petition is proper,” Devaney said, “but it is certainly a signal that it’s time for the president to show some leadership and work to unite America rather than divide us.”

Steve Garrison, chairman of the political science department at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, said that what’s going on in the country isn’t party specific, as seen in the 2008 election. Garrison said voters were tired of out-of-control spending by the Bush administration in 2008 and voted in Democrats, a political swing of the pendulum. This go-round, he said, voters decided to stay with the status quo.

“Americans are fickle,” he said. “When we get tired of that, we’ll go to the other side.”